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Tracking and responding to diverse customer behaviors is a common challenge for teams. It's often unclear which users need more attention or how to boost product engagement.
Without proper segmentation, you can easily miss key signals that affect growth or churn. Behavioral segmentation solves this by categorizing users based on their interactions, helping you re-engage at-risk customers, nurture valuable accounts, and drive adoption.
Done right, it improves both customer experience and retention. In this blog, we’ll explore how behavioral segmentation can help you build more effective strategies for stronger Customer Success.
What is user status behavioral segmentation?
At its core, behavioral segmentation is the practice of dividing customers into different groups based on their interactions with your product.
Unlike demographic segmentation – which might categorize customers based on things like company size, industry, or geographic location – behavioral segmentation looks at what users are actually doing inside your platform.
For example, you might break users into segments such as:
- Active users: Regularly engaging with your product and showing consistent activity.
- Inactive or at-risk users: Those whose engagement is declining or who have reduced activity.
- Power users: Customers who use advanced features frequently and interact with your product at a high level.
- New users: Recently onboarded and still in the learning phase.
- Churning users: Customers showing early signs of churn, such as infrequent logins or disengagement with your team.
Focusing on behavior instead of demographics gives you a clearer, more actionable view of what’s driving success or failure in your customer base.
Now that we’ve covered the basics of behavioral segmentation, let’s explore why this approach is crucial for Customer Success teams and how it can help you prioritize your efforts more effectively.
Why user segmentation is crucial for Customer Success teams
Once you’ve segmented your users based on behavior, you can start to address their specific needs more proactively.
This is where the real value of behavioral segmentation comes in: it allows you to take action based on what users are actually doing, or not doing, in your product.
Let’s break down why segmentation is so important for improving your Customer Success strategy:
1. Enhancing proactive engagement
By segmenting users, you can take proactive steps to address their needs. For example, if you notice that an at-risk customer’s engagement is declining, you might schedule more frequent check-ins or send targeted educational content to re-engage them.
On the other hand, highly engaged or power users might appreciate special attention or advanced training to deepen their product usage.
2. Personalizing customer journeys
Not every customer needs the same level of support. Segmenting them based on behavior allows you to personalize each stage of the customer journey.
New users might benefit from more onboarding and training resources, while long-time customers could need less hand-holding but more attention during renewal periods.
3. Driving product adoption and feature utilization
Understanding how different user segments engage with your product can help you identify opportunities to drive adoption. For example, if a group of users is only engaging with basic features, you can implement targeted campaigns to promote advanced functionalities.
You can use platforms like Velaris to track feature adoption and usage patterns, helping you decide where to focus automation or personalized outreach to improve engagement.
Next, let’s explore which specific behavioral data points you should focus on when segmenting users. Knowing what to track will make your segmentation efforts even more effective.
Key behavioral data to focus on when segmenting users
Once you've identified the importance of user segmentation, the next step is to focus on the key behavioral data that will inform your strategy.
By understanding specific user behaviors, you can make more informed decisions about where to focus your efforts and how to deliver more personalized support. Here are some essential data points to consider:
1. Feature usage patterns
Knowing which features your users engage with most can help you identify power users who are getting the most out of your product. On the flip side, it can also highlight users who are struggling with adoption, providing a clear opportunity for targeted outreach or additional training.
2. Login frequency
Tracking how often users log into your platform can quickly show you who is engaged and who may be slipping away. Users with declining or irregular login activity can be flagged for re-engagement campaigns, helping you focus on accounts at risk of churn.
3. Support interactions
Users who frequently submit support tickets or ask for help could indicate deeper issues, such as a lack of product understanding. Identifying these users allows you to proactively offer additional training or resources to help them succeed.
4. Survey responses
Customer feedback is essential for gauging satisfaction and linking it to user behavior. For instance, negative survey responses combined with declining engagement can indicate an at-risk user, while positive feedback from highly engaged users can help identify promoters.
By using customizable in-app or email surveys, such as NPS or CSAT within Velaris, you can gather customer sentiment and analyze it alongside behavioral data to gain a more complete understanding of your users. This approach allows you to create more meaningful and actionable user segments.
In the next section, we’ll explore how to implement effective segmentation strategies to enhance your Customer Success efforts.
How to implement effective user segmentation in Customer Success strategies
Once you’ve gathered behavioral data, the next step is to effectively implement user segmentation to drive better Customer Success outcomes.
Breaking this down into actionable steps ensures you’re able to segment users accurately and take the right actions to keep them engaged. Here’s a four-step approach to guide you through the process.
Step 1: Gather and unify customer data
The first step in effective segmentation is getting a complete, unified view of your customers. Often, data is scattered across different departments – sales, support, product, and marketing – making it hard to see the full picture of user behavior.
So to understand how customers engage with your product, you need to break down these silos and consolidate all relevant information.
Platforms like Velaris simplify this by automatically integrating data from multiple sources, such as CRM systems, support tickets, and marketing tools, into one unified view of each customer’s behavior.
Critical data points like customer health scores, feature usage, login frequency, and support ticket volume are the key metrics that should form the foundation of your segmentation strategy.
Step 2: Analyze behaviors and create user segments
Once you’ve unified your data, the next step is analyzing it to identify key behaviors that indicate Customer Success or failure. This could include specific product interactions, usage milestones, or frequency of support requests.
Look for patterns that signal customer engagement or potential churn. These behaviors will form the basis of your segmentation strategy.
With the behaviors defined, you can create actionable user segments such as “highly engaged,” “new,” “at-risk,” or “inactive.” Each segment should represent a different level of engagement with your product.
Each product is different, so your user segments should reflect that. Determine what metrics best represent each segment in your product.
Step 3: Automate processes and outreach for each segment
To manage your different user segments efficiently, automation is essential. Each segment will require a tailored approach to engagement – whether it’s re-engaging at-risk users or providing more in-depth support for new customers.
Automation can help you create trigger-based outreach campaigns. For instance, you could send a series of automated emails to users with declining activity levels, encouraging them to re-engage with the product.
You can use tools like Velaris for their automation builders to set up these processes for each segment. Whether it’s an educational nudge for new users or a re-engagement campaign for inactive accounts, automation will ensure you don’t miss a beat.
Step 4: Standardize your Customer Success workflows with playbooks
Having a solid segmentation strategy in place is only effective if your team knows how to engage with each segment consistently. That’s where standardized workflows come in.
Playbooks provide predefined workflows for different customer segments, ensuring that your team follows a consistent approach.
Whether it’s onboarding new users, re-engaging inactive users, or identifying upsell opportunities for power users, having clear steps for each scenario helps to avoid confusion and ensures that every customer gets the appropriate level of attention.
Velaris allows you to create and standardize these workflows with customizable playbooks. This means your team can consistently follow best practices, reducing the chances of missed opportunities or inconsistent customer engagement.
Step 5: Measure impact and iterate
The final step is measuring the effectiveness of your segmentation strategy. Without tracking KPIs, it’s impossible to know whether your efforts are working.
Metrics like churn rate, upsell opportunities, Net Promoter Score (NPS) responses, and customer satisfaction scores should be continuously monitored to refine your approach.
With Velaris, you can easily monitor KPIs like customer health scores in real time. This enables you to adjust your segmentation and outreach efforts based on what’s working and what’s not, ensuring your strategy is always aligned with business outcomes.
By following these four steps, you can implement user segmentation in a way that’s both effective and scalable.
Conclusion
Incorporating user status behavioral segmentation into your Customer Success strategy can make a significant difference in how effectively you engage with your customers.
By focusing on key behaviors like feature usage, login frequency, and support interactions, you can tailor your approach to meet the specific needs of each segment.
Leveraging a Customer Success platform with automation, real-time data tracking, and AI-driven insights is crucial to making segmentation more efficient and actionable.
If you’re looking to address these pain points and create a more data-driven, proactive Customer Success strategy, book a demo today to see how Velaris can help you get started.
